Comment by dividefuel

Comment by dividefuel 4 days ago

40 replies

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I don't think revenge is the motivation, but it's hard to know what the actual motivation is. I think it's some mix of:

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

- Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

- Belief that remote workers are more likely to jump to another company

- Opportunity to claw back a perk that can be returned in future negotiations if needed

- Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks

- Execs personally prefer employees in office for some other reason (e.g., wanting to feel powerful)

- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)

wubrr 4 days ago

> and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

They had the exact opposite conclusions when they were pushing WFH. They also shut down comment threads and questions from internal employees asking for data backing up their more recent claims.

> Big tech companies are mature and no longer need to compete so heavily on brand/perks

If AWS starts losing employees at any serious rate, they will collapse. They already have a huge amount of products and services where the initial engineers left and where oncall/support load is absolutely brutal.

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  • hyperadvanced 4 days ago

    Love when the “we use data” people shut down discussions around hard metrics when it’s not convenient

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    • ethbr1 4 days ago

      An open argument doesn't automatically mean hard metrics.

      Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith, curious about the problem, and open to a variety of conclusions.

      If management has already made their decision, that's not going to happen. If employees have already decided to ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not going to happen.

      The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.

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  • dividefuel 4 days ago

    Yes, I think there's a big distinction between "Execs think being in office is better for culture/productivity" VS "Execs have data that proves being in office is better for culture/productivity."

    I believe the first one is true, but not the second.

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yodsanklai 4 days ago

Perhaps culture and productivity is actually better in office. I'm remote and would like to keep it that way, but that's also an hypothesis to consider (Occam's razor). These big corps claim they're data driven, so perhaps that's what their data is saying.

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  • wouldbecouldbe 4 days ago

    Truth it, it depends on the type of person, type of team, type of work and most importantly trust.

    There are definitely lots of great & honest homeworkers but also know plenty who go on dates or work on their startups secretly.

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  • 0cf8612b2e1e 4 days ago

    Why would all of the forced RTO companies not share the golden data that proves their point?

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    • woah 4 days ago

      What's the upside for them?

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      • 0cf8612b2e1e 4 days ago

        To look like they are making a data driven decision? That this is not based on wanting to see butts in chairs?

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  • megablast 4 days ago

    I work less at home. Too many distractions.

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    • Nadya 4 days ago

      Not only do I work less in the office - the quality of the work I produce is lower. I'm more stressed out about things that I no longer have the time for because I'm wasting time commuting to work when I could be taking care of chores and errands or myself.

      If I ever have to waste 5 more minutes over water cooler chat about what someone did the last weekend I'm putting in my 2 weeks notice. I don't go to work to socialize and as far as I can tell that is the real reason people want to RTO. They quite literally don't know how to socialize outside of work and bugging their coworkers so want everyone to RTO so they have people to chat with who have no choice but to pretend to be listening and be courteous with them.

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    • chgs 4 days ago

      I work more at home, no distractions. Oh and a desk rather than going to get one. And a couple of monitors. And no need for headphones in a meeting.

      Your inability to separate work from non work is your problem.

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    • xkqd 4 days ago

      I work less in the office. Too many distractions.

      Also the corporate productivity difference is only marginally better, but I get to spend significant time surrounded by my wife and children.

      I will not be in my deathbed wishing I spent less time with my loved ones. It’s interesting how RTO mandates reveal the priorities of those around us.

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    • yodsanklai 4 days ago

      I actually have no idea if I would work better at the office. I work quite well at home, and it's certainly possible to slack at the office. Nobody is behind your back and there are distractions there too.

      I would benefit for more interactions with my colleagues, that's certain. And I think I would have a better separation between work and life if I was working from the office.

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    • jvanderbot 4 days ago

      I'm the opposite. on my last team, about half were out of town and half were in office. Everyone was very productive.

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throwaway240916 4 days ago

My company was

- Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

> Eng was a cost center, so the business side didn't understand and thought it unfair.

- An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

> Eng was happy for attrition to meet a strategic goal of 50/50 India hiring

- Execs have strong data that productivity is higher in an office (seems unlikely, surely they'd have published it by now)

> Opposite: during the initial switch (we had a mgmt change later too), they found ppl were active more hours on slack, had better silly metrics like code commits, prs, pr reviews. Not the best measure, but since no one knew they were looking, likely to be relatively accurate. They were very confident in this posture.

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xyzzyz 4 days ago

> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

This is something that banks and commercial real estate owners would want, but it is highly unlikely to be motivating the companies actually using the space.

1. If they lease the space, they don’t care about the building values, and in fact would prefer for them to sink so that they can renegotiate leases or move to cheaper buildings.

2. If they own the building, then forcing your own employees into it does relatively little to influence its value, because the value of buildings is determined by the market, ie. the sale prices of similar buildings in similar locations. If buildings around you sell for peanut due to low demand, yours won’t sell for higher just because it’s full. You’d need everyone else to cooperate, and this kind of coordination problem is extremely hard.

3. Even if forcing employees into offices was beneficial from the perspective of real estate values, or at least people responsible for managing real estate inside the companies, the fact of the matter is that these people ultimately don’t have enough pull to enforce such a critical policy change. No CEO in his or her right mind will decide to sign off on return to office mandate based on any real estate value projections. The potential gain here is really trivial relative to changes in employee productivity or increases in turnover.

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streblo 4 days ago

> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.

Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.

I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.

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  • oblio 4 days ago

    Well, I'm curious how this management life improvement will manifest as they're also kicking out managers or at least forcing them to have quite a few more reports. At about 10 reports teams can't really be managed well.

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  • simoncion 3 days ago

    > They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.

    Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.

    > If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.

    After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.

    If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.

    Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.

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clumsysmurf 4 days ago

- Upper management wants to reserve remote perks for themselves. Otherwise what's the point of being upper management without perks.

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htrp 4 days ago

it's really an indictment of management, whose inability to learn how to manage a remote workforce means that they default back to the idea of management by walking around that they learned at HBS

if your management tree is a bunch of ex MBB consultants, you absolutely have this problem whether you believe so or not

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  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4 days ago

    It is. My favorite story as an immediate aftermath of post-covid was a middle manager complaining that he 'had to throw away his toolset' ( code word for being able to threaten people into compliance ). Management and executive class have been skating by and, having completed my MBA not that long ago, I can categorically say that some reckoning is due.

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hnthrowaway6543 4 days ago

> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)

fwiw I talk to a lot of execs/board members and the belief here is genuine, whether or not workers agree with it. Most other execs I've talked to have wanted to pull the trigger on full RTO for years but have been afraid because they know it's a hugely unpopular decision. With a major player like Amazon doing it now, it's suddenly a lot easier to justify to employees. I suspect by 2026 fully-remote jobs will be about as common as they were pre-COVID, which is to say they exist but are an exception, not the norm.

> - An opportunity to force attrition without layoffs

this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word. Layoffs = we want to cut spending to improve our cash position/burn rate/etc. It's more accurate to say it's a way to get rid of people who aren't "dedicated" for lack of a better word, without a ton of paperwork. The idea being that if someone hates the company enough that showing up to an office 5 days/week will make them quit, you're better off replacing them.

> - Maintain real estate value / Justify real estate investments

This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now

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  • HarHarVeryFunny 4 days ago

    > this is almost right but "layoffs" is the wrong word

    Well, it's not quite the same as the forced relocation to Alaska, but if you're taking away a hugely popular perk and forcing people back to spending a couple of hours a day commuting, then you have to realize you are going to lose people, even if you rationalize it as a loyalty or team spirit test.

    Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.

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    • hnthrowaway6543 4 days ago

      No, layoffs is still the wrong word. If I'm a 100 person company and I lay off 50 employees, I'm now a 50 person company. If I'm a 100 person company and I institute an RTO mandate and 50 people leave, I replace those people with 50 other people and I'm still a 100 person company.

      > Things like this have a tendency to backfire though ... the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. The ones who are unhappy but less able to move will just RTO as pissed off employees.

      There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.

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      • endtime 4 days ago

        > > the people who will chose to quit will be the ones who can most easily get new jobs - the best people. > > There are lots of reasons good people quit. Good people are not universally against RTO. Many are. But many other good people stuck around at Amazon even after the mandated 3 days per week in office, and many good people will stick around with 5 days per week.

        You are mixing up "quit -> best" and "best -> quit".

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  • norir 4 days ago

    I find it very unlikely that we return to prepandemic work culture. Too many people value more flexible arrangements and so many people will trade compensation for quality of life and many companies will find it a competitive edge that gives than access to great workers who would otherwise take more money from full time RTO companies.

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    • ghaff 4 days ago

      Maybe. A lot of people have to be in-person and a lot of people can't just casually trade off compensation for coming into an office if that's an option. There's probably more flexibility in general though some of that is as much about mobile communications as post-pandemic.

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  • conception 4 days ago

    It’s not that execs have investments but if a company spends hundreds of millions of dollars on half-empty buildings, they look bad and are losing money on the investment.

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  • ghaff 4 days ago

    Yeah. What I've seen personally is that normalizing rarely coming into an office means that a lot of people essentially stop coming in even if maybe coming in half the time and doing off-sites actually makes a lot of sense. People just make coming into an office an exceptional event and if other people they know aren't there, why bother? Latterly, if I came into my nominal work location 30 minutes away, I would not know or work with a single person there.

    And it may even be understandable to the degree that they end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.

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  • oblio 4 days ago

    > This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now.

    Amazon's main shareholders are Vanguard and the like, that for sure also have big commercial real estate investments.

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  • xenihn 4 days ago

    >This one's a silly conspiracy theory, most executives don't have heavy investments in commercial real estate, at least not directly... residential has been so much more profitable for decades now

    What you're replying to doesn't specify commercial.

    If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.

    Plus this isn't even about individual executive investments. It is about corporate investments, and duty to shareholders.

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    • hnthrowaway6543 4 days ago

      > If you know any executives, you know they own multiple homes. You can connect the dots here between a rise in real-estate prices in tech hubs and RTO directives.

      I don't understand how the massive rise in residential real estate prices from 2020 to 2022 shows any dots between RTO and home prices being connected.

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AtlasBarfed 4 days ago

Look people, those foosball tables are a major investment.

Major.

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ransom1538 4 days ago

US tax codes prevent hiring software devs. No one is going to hire US software devs ever again. (Good voting guys!).

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/12/19/the-tax-change-that-s-...

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